The process from sending the CV to the first interview took approximately one month. HR had not responded for a long time. Then, they arranged a phone interview with a senior developer from MS.

The interview was quite brief. The developer asked a couple of general questions, such as:

• What is your software development background?
• What are you working on now?

Then, we moved directly to programming. There was only one problem: determine whether two strings are anagrams, i.e., contain the same letters.

Anagram Detection

This algorithm's complexity can be reduced to O(n) by counting the frequencies of every letter from two words and comparing them. I did not arrive at that conclusion; instead, I suggested an O(n log n) algorithm. It seems that was my fault.